What Will Turkey Tolerate?

U.S. foreign-policy critic Noam Chomsky provides moral support for accused publisher Fatih Tas. The charges against Tas were dismissed.

For Turkey, a country that has long prided itself on being a bridge between East and West, the clash of civilizations begins at home. Two gatherings in Istanbul last week, held about a kilometer apart, again brought into sharp juxtaposition the external role that Turkey craves and the internal realities of a country struggling to improve the quality of its democracy. Both meetings, in their own way, emphasized the duality of a nation that desperately wants to be accepted into Europe, yet finds itself rebuffed time and again  in large measure because of its notoriously poor human-rights record.